Email Marketing Metrics Report

Click-to-Open Rates

July 2013 Edition

Click-to-open rate, or CTOR, reveals the effectiveness of email content. With CTOR, unique clicks are divided by unique opens, and then expressed as a percentage. This basically tells you: of the recipients who opened the email, how many clicked. In this way, CTOR indicates how well the design and offers within a message performed. Since CTOR is based on open rate, which is only an approximation, CTOR itself is also a ballpark figure. Nonetheless, no other metric indicates how well your content engages your recipients.

CTOR depends on many variables, such as industry, type of email, segmentation, and number of links, making it difficult to pinpoint a benchmark. For promotional campaigns, a good CTOR can vary from 20% to 30%. CTORs below this range may indicate that the email content could be made more favorable or relevant to recipients.

How do we calculate click-to-open rate? To calculate click-to-open rate, we divide the number of unique clicks in the email by the number of unique opens of the email. Then, we express this number as a percentage.

Click-to-Open Rates by Industry

The following chart shows CTOR by industry, based on our new industry classification. Industries with the top three CTORs include Recruitment and Staffing (49.1%), Security and Law Enforcement (39%), and Deals and Coupons (26.2%). Restaurant, Bar and Night Club (5.2%), Architecture and Construction (6.1%), and Healthcare (6.6%) scored the lowest CTORs.